Title: Reducing the spread of misinformation and correcting inaccurate beliefs

ABSTRACT   This talk will provide an overview of my research on misinformation, social media, and generative AI. First, I will discuss approaches for reducing the spread of misinformation on social media. This will focus on research showing that misinformation sharing is often due to inattention rather than intentional deception, and therefore that simple accuracy prompts can significantly reduce the spread of low-quality news, as shown in both survey experiments and field experiments with millions of users on Facebook and Twitter. Then I will discuss work on using large language models to correct inaccurate beliefs. I will briefly discuss work showing that brief human-AI dialogues can meaningfully reduce conspiracy beliefs, and then describe a number of other applications of human-AI dialogues to address misconceptions related to topics including race, vaccination, public health policy, and climate health. Together, this work sheds light on why misinformation spreads and potential solutions to combat its pernicious effects.

BIO  David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. As an interdisciplinary computational social scientist, David’s research combines behavioral experiments and online/field studies with mathematical and computational models to understand human decision-making. His work focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation on social media and what to do about it; how human-AI interactions can correct inaccurate beliefs; understanding political psychology and polarization; and promoting human cooperation. He has published over 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals such Nature, Science, PNAS, the American Economic Review, Psychological Science, Management Science, New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Political Science, and his work has received widespread media attention. David has frequently advised technology companies such as Google, Meta, and TikTok in their efforts to combat misinformation, and has provided testimony about misinformation to the US and UK governments. He has also written for popular press outlets including the New York Times, Wired, and New Scientist. He was named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” chosen as a 2012 Pop!Tech Science Fellow, awarded the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, chosen as fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, awarded the 2020 FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and selected as a 2021 Best 40-Under-40 Business School Professor by Poets & Quants. Papers he has coauthored have been awarded Best Paper of the Year in Experimental Economics, Social Cognition, and Political Methodology.

This is an IS Colloquium and a Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society - Data Science Distinguished Lecture